I have a lot of video on externals hards drives, but still in catdv (sometimes with proxy, sometine not). But on my main hard drive, I wanna do recherch with CatdV and find ONLY those on my main hard drive.

I found a temporary solution but I 'm not quite satisfied . What I want is to search according to the colums "Online" that contain thoses metadatas : Preview / None / Movie Offline / Online Movie.

As I said, CatDV cannot search on "online" because it does not store the files and so it cannot tell you if the data is "there" or not.

Think about it, until the app opens a catalog and sees if the file is there, it cannot tell you that a file is there. If it were to do that searches would take hours as each file would have to be checked for "there" or not.

In a large system this could literally take days. I suspect that you could fix this with some planning but it's beyond what we could address on a forum.

Sadly, I have little to add here as most of our clients are on large shared storage systems so files are "there" and if not, they are "archived." But the paths are the paths, forever once they enter CatDV.

Does anyone here on the forum have any cool tricks that they could share for this type of workflow?

CatDV Server. As I told u CatDV tell me the information I need is in the Built-in Fields "Online" with a logo or the second Metadata columns "Online" Built-in with this information : Preview / None / Movie Offline / Online Movie.

The first problem is that i cannot insert those field in query (and smath folder). If i use those columns in personal view, I can see them, but the Search in the task bar, it does'nt "see" them, sort them.

Yes, those fields are dynamically populated in the client only, they are not saved to the server as they are only pertinent to the client you are on at the moment.

Example:

Hard Drive called "Drive_1" Path to a file called "file.mov" at /Volumes/Drive_1/folder/file.mov

CatDV Client 1 has the drive mounted

CatDV Client 2 does not have the drive mounted

Worker Node 3 has the drive mounted

Worker Node 4 does not have the drive mounted

CatDV Server is a database app so it does not mount media storage.

Is the asset "online"? It is to Client 1 but not to Client 2, so what does the CatDV Server say? It says "I cannot store "online/offline" as a field because that data is only relevant to the client at the time of the catalog or query result being open. The Server has no opinion or knowledge of the online status of a file to a client.

If you stored "online" as the status, that would be incorrect for Client 2 & Worker 4. If you stored "offline" it would be incorrect for Client 1 & Worker 3. So CatDV Pro, the client app or the Worker Node, determines the online/offline status when they open the catalog or query the server so that they never save incorrect data to the server. The only thing that is always correct, is the path to the data, which should never change. If you are searching for "is it on Drive_1?" CatDV Server, as a database can only tell you what the client or Worker last told it, it cannot check for files as the database app never mounts and accesses media files, only the Clients and Worker Nodes.

I hope this helps. This is not a "problem" to be fixed. It is a function of CatDV's architecture and a really great and flexible one at that IMHO. If this isn't clear, please contact Squarebox support or your reseller for more information on CatDV's system architecture as this is far easier to demonstrate than type in text.

The function you are seeking is more a function of your data keeping practices and workflows than CatDV itself.

I'm curious why you cant just filter the results. Filters are perfect for the client side. I've used custom views to quickly sort if assets have proxies or tagged in something generic like keywords. But for online/offline I would search the database and filter if its online.

Did you try to filter if it's online from the tree? It's on the left side of the interface. I'm not sure if the search bar works or not to filter online. But it's pretty powerful to use this alternate approach to filter all sorts of criteria.